Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia

Michal Viewegh's novel Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia is the story of the young Beata Kralova and her not-so-young tutor. Beata is a 20-year-old drop-out and daughter of Denis Kral (i.e., King), a Czech "new millionaire" of dubious connections. Beata embraces lover after lover as well as causes new to Eastern Europe: the environment, animal rights, feminism, consumerism, new-age religion. This picaresque romp gives a gritty but hilarious portrait of today's Prague, its mafiosi and their ex-secret police bodyguards, the expatriate Americans, and many an extraordinary Czech, from a cremation enthusiast to a hopelessly naive sex-education teacher. The novel is also a serious exploration of the role of the writer in post-communist Central Europe. The narrator, himself an author and teacher who is in love with Beata, must portray her suicide in terms that explain her nihilism without losing faith in his own positive craft of story-telling. His hard-won credo as artist is to be an entertainer in a world of newly felt cruelty and suffering.